In hunting, decoys are often used to attract game. Floating decoys are typically dispersed on a body of water and held in place by an anchor. Existing anchors include a rope or wire that attaches to the decoy and a weight that acts as ballast fixedly attached to the end of the rope opposite the decoy. While this setup works well for anchoring the decoy in a body of water, the disadvantages of the fixed weight and wire system become apparent when attempting to cast decoys or when storing them.
With the weight fixed at one end of the rope or wire, it is difficult to cast the decoy because the weight is not concentrated at the decoy end of the line. Since the weight and decoy typically have different mass, the anchor and decoy are unbalanced, making it difficult to cast the decoy.
Also, when storing multiple decoys, the fixed weight and wire, if left dangling, are a common source of entanglement. It will be appreciated that, in the pre-dawn hours before hunting, the chore of untangling anchors is highly undesirable. To that end, existing decoys have addressed this problem by providing spools on the decoy on which the wire is wrapped or by using a weight that can be attached to the decoy after the wire has been wound on the body of the decoy. One decoy employs a lead band as a weight that is sufficiently malleable that it may be crimped around the neck of a duck decoy to hold it in place after the wire has been wrapped around the decoy's body. While these systems help prevent entanglement, they require considerable time to wrap and unwrap the wire.